As the semiconductor industry has progressed into nanometer technology process nodes in pursuit of higher device density, higher performance, and lower costs, challenges from both fabrication and design issues have resulted in the development of three-dimensional designs, such as a multi-gate field effect transistor (FET) including a fin FET (FinFET) and a gate-all-around (GAA) FET. In a FinFET, a gate electrode is adjacent to three side surfaces of a channel region with a gate dielectric layer interposed therebetween. Because the gate structure surrounds (wraps) the fin on three surfaces, the transistor essentially has three gates controlling the current through the fin or channel region. Unfortunately, the fourth side, the bottom part of the channel is far away from the gate electrode and thus is not under close gate control. In contrast, in a GAA FET, the four side surfaces of the channel region are surrounded by the gate electrode, which allows for fuller depletion in the channel region and results in less short-channel effects, such as steeper sub-threshold current swing (SS) and smaller drain induced barrier lowering (DIBL).
As transistor dimensions are continually scaled down to sub 20-25 nm technology nodes, further improvements of the GAA FET are required.